Visual Arts

Vojtech V. Sláma's photographs look as though they might have been taken 80 years ago. This young photographer, who is part of "Contemporary Czech Photography" at Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery, works in a modernist tradition and doesn't feed the need to compromise with sly winks that acknowledge the past-tense nature of his idiom.

That may sound like damning with faint praise, but in fact Mr. Sláma's 10-by-10-inch, black-and-white prints celebrate the vigor that can still be found in the aptly observed and carefully composed image. He pulls off shots of sunbathing nudes, a single café table, and even a cat in a rain-spotted window with both great style and intelligence. His work is the best in this exhibition of other accomplished photographers.

Modernist traditions are also present in the photograms of Gabriela Kolcavová, the surrealist elements of the everyday found in Igor Malijevsky's black-and-whites and the reportage of the everyday from Milan Fano Blatny.

Vojtech V. Sláma's Perforated Tatra, Brno, CZ, 2000

Color projects by Evzen Sobek and Hana Jakrlova offer a more analytical, postmodern take on contemporary Czech society. Mr. Sobek presents a community of retirees who have set up their trailer camp along some of their country's new man-made lakes. They proudly display the large carp they catch on their daily fishing trips.

Charles Dee Mitchell

Talent might sometimes occur as the needle in the haystack, but you shouldn't have to search too hard for it once you know where to look. Talent tries to make itself known. Despite a lot of work to offer, "New Texas Talent XV," Craighead Green Gallery's 15th annual juried exhibition, is long on hay yet short on haymakers.

This year, it fell on Julie Kronick, Neiman Marcus corporate collection curator, to sort through about 500 entries in the open submission pool and pick out the meritorious cases. Ms. Kronick trimmed the list substantially, whittling the pool down to a show of 25 artists, plus two picked by the gallery, but she might have done more editing.

Biomorphic abstraction – in particular, encaustic with floral imagery – dominates the exhibition, to the point where painters working in that mode are hard-pressed to stand out.

Jenifer McNeil Baker's long-exposure digital photographs capture solid streaks of bright color, a welcome stop for the eye in a show that is dour, exceedingly modernist and chock-a-block with abstract symbols. Jimmie Hudson, one of the gallery's picks, also excels by making room for humor with a painting of a Lamb Chop float in a parade.

Lambchop in Belgrade by Jimmie Hudson

While Roma Misra's thick globbed brushstrokes reveal the kind of talent that can be cultivated, just one artist shows true confidence in what he's achieved: Nathaniel Glaspie. His minimal compositions pair barely there ink drawings on wood with smooth, polished Plexiglas surfaces in diptych arrangements. Oh, he may be a year or two behind a number of lo-fi painters working with this sort of notion in mind. But Mr. Glaspie alone seems to grasp the lessons of art history that followed the invention of abstraction – and new talent knows where it comes from.

Kriston Capps

The Olympic Games in China have garnered attention not just for ageless gymnasts and advanced Speedo technology, but for Beijing itself. Flossy architecture, repressed speech zones and dense smog are all qualities that observers picked up on as the city hosted the Games.

These characteristics amount to a superficial encapsulation of the city; a familiar but very different sort of representation of Beijing emerges in RMB City, a video art piece by Chinese artist Cao Fei. On view at Conduit Gallery, RMB City (named after the abbreviation for renminbi, China's currency) is Ms. Cao's distillation of Beijing, as well as a promotional video for her Second Life city. (Second Life is a fully formed Internet-based virtual world, where users, in the form of avatars, socialize, trade and otherwise engage with one another.)

Ms. Cao conceived RMB City as part of a larger suite of digital videos, a Second Life documentary called i.Mirror. In the video, a virtual camera zooms in and out of the micro-cityscape, recognizable to Olympics hawks by the now-iconic Bird's Nest stadium. The gravity-defying, D-shaped, Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV Tower, which is still under construction in real-life Beijing, is represented by a small-scale CCTV Tower swinging wildly from a crane over the city.

Incredible pollution fumes from an industrial plant at the heart of the urban center, while a floating military base station drone fires missiles willy-nilly; ancient Beijing is represented, too, by an imperial palace, situated just off-center in the city. Intriguingly, a statue of Mao floats in the water – not quite sinking but not exactly part of the city-in-planning.

A video still from Cao Fei's RMB City, in her virtual Second Life city

That suggests that Ms. Cao's vision of Beijing is progressive – as if the plucky score weren't indication enough – but it might also hint at the city's future. RMB City is supposed to open to virtual citizens, who can spend real-life money on residences and offices. (It's a true, working, Second Life city, whatever that means.) Ironically, RMB City might become the Forbidden City for Beijing's wired class: Some have speculated that Second Life might be the next site to wind up on the list of Web destinations banned by the Chinese government.

Kriston Capps

"Cao Fei: RMB City – a Second Life City" continues through Wednesday at Conduit Gallery, 1626-C Hi Line Drive. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Free. 214-939-0064. www.conduitgallery.com.